In a rushed process without meaningful consultation or debate, Mexico's Congress has adopted a new copyright law modeled on the U.S. system, without taking any account of the well-publicized, widely acknowledged problems with American copyright law. The new law was passed as part of a package of legal reforms accompanying the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Donald Trump's 2020 successor to 1989's North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

However, Mexico's implementation of this Made-in-America copyright system imposes far more restrictions than either the USMCA demands or that Canada or the USA have imposed on themselves. This new copyright regime places undue burdens on Mexican firms and the Mexican people, conferring a permanent trade advantage on the richer, more developed nations of the USA and Canada, while undermining the fundamental rights of Mexicans guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights.

The opposition that sprang up after the swift passage of the new Mexican copyright law faces many barriers, but among the most serious ones is a disinformation campaign that (predictably) characterizes the claims about U.S. copyright law as "fake news". The EFF has more experience with the defects of U.S. copyright law than anyone, and in the sections below we will use it to explain in detail how Mexico's copyright law repeats and magnifies the errors that American lawmakers committed in 1998.

This white paper aggregates all of EFF's analysis and commentary on the new law, including a detailed legal analysis by EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh.